Equipment that provides a high degree of reliability is a prime consideration of organizations that supply Internet and Intranet services. To help meet this need, technology has become available to combine several devices into a cluster that is configured to act as a single device. Using the cluster arrangement, it is intended that the failure of one device does not significantly affect the remaining components within the cluster.
Clusters may be configured to provide many services. For example, clusters are configured to perform traffic management, Domain Name System services, user authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) services and collection of operational statistics. These types of services are generally known as Network Management (NM) services. The process of configuring these Network Management services within the cluster is known as Cluster Management. The act of a new device becoming part of a cluster is called ‘joining’.
In a typical single-device system, the operation of the NM services is governed by a set of attributes known as the NM configuration. The Network Management system allows the viewing of the configuration and monitored data and manipulation of the configuration in several ways, including through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), a Command Line Interface (CLI) and via the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Configuring the devices within the cluster is difficult and error prone.
One problem is that it is difficult to maintain identical configurations of the Network Management features on all devices within the cluster. In addition, errors in the configuration of one device, or incompatible configurations among the devices, may render a particular NM feature inoperable.
Manually configuring cluster attributes for a new cluster member is difficult and error prone. It is also difficult to manually determine and apply which NM attributes of a cluster member should be cloned on a new member. Additionally, it is difficult to apply NM attributes of the cluster each time a new device joins a cluster.